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Topics:

-Joe made it to Portland, Oregon and had the chance to hang out with friend of the show Kevin Ginger. Sam is in Wakesha, WI

-As the show start time approaches, Sam runs into issues on his own computer. Joe wonders if it’s /var/folders. Why is this directory such a mystery to us?

-An iMac Pro comes to Joe’s workbench with strange problems with the Share menu. One method of troubleshooting was using the Recovery Partition and he ran into Secure Boot features:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330

After attempting Apple Configurator 2 and not having success, Joe’s team contacted Apple. The suggestion was made for a full unit replacement.

*Joe can see the future about future Mac computers with the T2 chip as this show was recorded prior to the recent 2018 MacBook Pro announcements-Joe & Sam go down memory lane about the various models and how troubleshooting has changed

-Does Joe miss Touch ID on his MacBook Pro? Yes however he still had “Unlock with Apple Watch”. That is, until his Apple Watch decided to self destruct.

This week we are proud to be sponsored by FLEXdesk, an offering from our friends at Rooted Consulting. FLEXdesk - Help Desk support that grows with you

Topics:

-Joe has some questions about content caching and working with multiple WAN IP addresses. Sam makes an attempt at discussing while on the road.

-Sam encounters an issue when attempting to download a full macOS High Sierra installer. With content caching enabled on another computer, the App Store only downloaded a small 15 MB file. Only when turning content caching off would it download the full installer.

-Jerry is in the midst of a remodel in his home office so he talks about the struggles of being uprooted and moving equipment

-He recommends theTP-Link PowerLine Adapters as a good alternative to ethernet when that’s not possible:https://amzn.to/2N6vX6P

-After Jerry was talking about how an Apple TV reset worked to correct issues, Joe suggests a change in our motto to “Have you tried resetting it?”

-Quick tip from Jerry about a client that took their Mac into the Apple Store and were told that it needed a new logic board. He saves the day by unplugging the battery and the client is ecstatic that it turned on again.

-A reminder from Jerry to have your clients put reviews on Google or Yelp

-Joe has some Safari gripes to talk about. At times, when clicking on a link in Apple Mail, it will open a new tab in one of his minimized windows in the Dock. Jerry wonders if it’s more of a peeve than a gripe.

-Another annoyance is making exceptions to invalid certificates in https sites. He also noticed that the password dialogue box is for the current logged in user’s credentials. Sam thinks this is because it is placing an exception in the user’s keychain. Jerry wonders if it’s a router’s config page with an expired certificate. An older version of Firefox is the workaround.

-Joe attempts to hold Sam to his keychain thought and he cannot verify as he is careening down the highway at high speeds

-A connection to John Gruber and Daring Fireball - he declares the Menu Bar as the Mac’s greatest invention. Joe says Command+Tab is the greatest keyboard invention. Sam wonders what came first, Command+Tab or Windows key+Tab?

-Right up to the start of the show, Sam was working on an iPhone with water damage with a good friend of the family. An odd situation came up with relation to iCloud backups. Jerry has a suggestion based on an old trick to resolve Time Machine backups. Stay tuned to the next show to find out what happens!

-A pet peeve of Jerry's is when he might shave off some time to be nice. A client pays and then keeps you around to enter information in the register, delaying you even more.

-Sam recalls that awkward moment when a client was opening a safe in front of you and trying to make sure you aren't able to see

-As Jerry is running, he listens to podcasts. He shares another pet peeve for playing sound effects that scares the heck out of you while running on the road.

-Working with SonicWall is nothing new to Sam but he had a moment of frustration setting up the SSL VPN client on Windows 10

-While on the Windows topic, Jerry has problems with a computer that ended up being Windows Home Edition

-The dreaded employee or friend that gives a client bad advice that makes them second guess you

-Jerry deals with Windows 5?? (Windows NT) and trouble with UPS

-Sam shares a funny story about hanging out with Adam Rice at ACEs and learning that Reachability actually does exist on the iPhone X! Chalk that up to something he should have known.

-We have probably all been there before: Jerry talks about a client that swears that a feature existed before when it actually didn't.

-This week we are proud to be sponsored by FLEXdesk, an offering from our friends at Rooted Consulting. FLEXdesk - Help Desk support that grows with you

Topics:

-Sam starts the show by discussing a recent rate increase he is introducing

-Jerry discusses timing of rate hikes

-While on the topic, Sam shares a story about tough negotiations with a particular client

-After an announcement from CrashPlan ending PROe Server for Mac, Jerry has to take steps to keep his server up and running for clients using Parallels and Ubuntu

-A brief talk about storing data in the cloud and FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt)

-"All my data is gone" - Sam recalls a story where a client fiddled with equipment and caused a minor scare for herself

-After replacing macOS Server with a Synology, Sam gets the dreaded ticket to report that items are missing. The story turns to an issue of illegal characters in filenames. An old favorite called A Better Finder Rename is brought in to do mass renames on the server.

Topics:

-This week's show is brought to you by FLEXdesk - your help desk support that grows with your company. Go to rootedconsulting.org/flexdesk to find out more.

-Jerry takes over Joe's Peeves Corner as he gripes about Apple Remote Desktop and its annoying habit of jumping to different computers when it is populating a list

-It brings up the topic of Addigy and their remote access client and its speedy and reliable access. Also Addigy's SSH/command line capabilities to perhaps kickstart Apple Remote Desktop.

-Joe talks about users enabling Printer Sharing. If users turn it on and people connect through it, changing the host computer's name in System Preferences>Sharing will cause shared users to no longer be able to use it.

-Continuing failed updates with High Sierra and the now infamous "missing or damaged" error

-It reminds Joe of a story where a client had a firmware password on a Mac that was acquired from a previous user. In a similar situation where the Apple Store could not/would not unlock it. They extracted the hard drive, installed it in another system and wiped/updated it. They then placed it back in the original iMac and it successfully booted.

-Jerry floats a conspiracy theory as to why these installer issues have been so rampant

"Joe's Tech Clinic" - After an upgrade to High Sierra, the Dock and Finder were slow to respond after booting each time. Subsequent downloads would cause the Dock to then be unresponsive, once complete. Joe attempted many fixes: resetting launch services, removing /var/folders contents (except zz), safe boot, resetting NVRAM, SMC, nada. Also tried trashing Dock preferences and rebuilt manually. A key was that the Downloads folder was not in the Dock. Unbelievably, adding it to the Dock corrected the issue!

-A nice addition to the show is additional audio from our interview with Justin Maxwell of smith.ai and Keypad. Justin talks about his time working for Apple.

-The rumor about being caught in an elevator with Steve Jobs turns out to be true!

-Joe remembers the time of the release of the Intel processor. At that time, Justin was part of the team building the iLife website (in Flash!). At that time, Adobe decided not to release Flash for the intel processors. Justin's team had to rebuild the entire website, working through holidays and weekends to meet a deadline. Released the morning of MacWorld, Steve Jobs hated it! Justin kept a little memento to remind him of that time in his life.

-Of the many things that Justin learned from all of this, Steve was almost always right. He always thought of the user first.

Topics:

-Sam follows up on his experience at the ACN Road Show in Santa Monica, CA

-Sam shares a story from one of our listeners that recovered a stolen MacBook Pro with assistance from the police department

-In working with a client, Joe discovers that Find My iPhone was off. He also discussed enabling show last location, which is a handy feature.

-Sam tries to inject a new segment in the show, "Sam's travel corner"

-Jerry reminds us about taking a few moments to ask clients for an online review

-Jerry talks about an experience with a client that had a failed High Sierra upgrade - "macOS could not be installed on this computer" and used terminal to correct it:diskutil listdiskutil umount force /dev/disk1(Take note of your disk id. disk1 in my case)diskutil apfs convert /dev/disk1

-A client that politely declined Joe's monthly services plan ends up with an issue with data loss after a liquid spill and the Apple Store replaced hardware. PsiMac to the rescue: had her order the hard drive from Backblaze. It contained a full copy of her home folder, which brought her data back. Two fallout issues were Keychain related and the Photos library.

-A story you have to hear to believe - Joe's client has an issue with sending emails from Outlook and coming out as gibberish to receivers. After upgrading from Outlook 2011 to 2016, the issue remained. In the end, an errant carriage return in one of her contact names caused this formatting issue to occur.

ACEs Conference was created for one reason and one reason only:To help IT consultants grow their companies.

With unique, premium content delivered by world-class speakers, ACEs Conference is the place for inspiration, ideas, business networking, and instantly-applicable knowledge. It’s no surprise that our attendees continue coming year after year—just one ACEs Conference and you’ll be sold.

We're sponsored this week by Watchman Monitoring, a favorite tool of ours that should be in every professional consultant's toolkit.

Visit WatchmanMonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr and sign up for your free trial to find out how Watchman Monitoring can keep an eye on your client machines and notify you of over 100 issues. Be sure to tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to support the show!

Topics:

-Joe calls back to a 27" iMac hinge repair. Sam & Joe have both used https://www.themachack.com to hold up the display. But Joe references that Apple will reimburse customers with proof of repair.

-Joe's pop quiz: how is a shut down and cold boot different from a restart?

-Another new segment from Joe! How to think like a client?This week: Backups. A client wouldn't realize that the key to laptops backing up reliably is to plug them into power while they are open and awake, unless they support Power Nap (Dark Wake). The default setting is not to back up while on battery power.

-One of Jerry's clients has an issue where she thought all of her documents appearing as My Documents.zip. The explanation is something we have all encountered before.

-How much time have you spent assisting clients with downloading and running TeamViewer?

Topics:

We have the great pleasure of having not one, but two guests on this week. Jeramy LeCompte and Daniel Allen of Rooted Consulting join us to talk about their outsourced help desk service, FLEXdesk.

Jeramy lecompte

daniel allen

FLEXdesk is a flexible, outsourced HelpDesk service that allows you to quickly and easily scale your business with a highly qualified and experienced team without adding the expenses associated with traditional employees. This allows you to focus on customer support and gives you peace of mind to provide a great customer experience.

Michael has spent over ten years of working professionally alongside the sales and service branches of Apple Australia. He has gained a deep understanding of the complexities and uniqueness of selling and supporting Apple branded equipment.

After 8 years of independent consulting he founded Origin84 in 2015 to meet the opening in the Australian market for a mid size Apple focussed support and management consultancy. Over the past 12 months Origin84 has grown to be a premiere supplier of premium professional services in Australia to the advertising, marketing and banking sectors - or any company who rely on Macs to make their living. Origin84 has also been specifically sought out to work with a number of international and multinational clientele.

Topics:

-Joe remembers the kind gift that Michael gave us during the live ACEs show last year

-Home users are not part of Origin 84's business focus

-Requirements for ACNs outside of the US are different and some of those details come in to focus

-Australia has a small market and is heavily regulated and Michael gives us his thoughts and process

-Michael changed his model from ordering application licenses to having the client purchase, thereby adjusting risk/reward ratio. It also empowers the client as opposed to you holding all the keys and a false sense of job security.

-As Jerry comments on Michael’s keen business acumen, he talks about his influences

-An interesting discussion brews about putting profit first, then factor in all of your costs

-Sound advice about considering margins in your timing to allow for less stress on your team to get the job done right instead of worrying about the clockShaun Blanc - https://shawnblanc.net/margin/

-“I don’t like apologizing”. Michael goes on to talk about not making mistakes, and that’s where time comes in as a benefit for your engineers as well as the clients.

-Joe brings up the origin of the Origin 84 name (here’s a hint, the year 1984 plays a role)

-A deeper dive about the ACN program not only outside of the United States, but what the ACN of the future will look like.

- "Whip-smart ideas and advice for businesses who earn a living with their Macs." -Michael Thomsen

-Encryption a Fusion drive with FileVault was proving to be a long and arduous process for Jerry. Only periodically moving the mouse would force it to progress again. Jerry found a free app called "Jiggler" to keep the mouse active periodically. http://www.sticksoftware.com/software/Jiggler.htmlTo see the status of the encryption process, he used this command:diskutil cs list | grep “Conversion Progress”

Topics:

-This week we are proud to be sponsored by FLEXdesk, an offering from our friends at Rooted Consulting. FLEXdesk - Help Desk support that grows with you

-Sam shares a story where a client has some confusion with hardware

-Social media and clients. Do they mix?

-Joe shares a story about a client calling and saying the keyboards were not working at their retail store so they couldn't check out customers. We walked through looking for a battery compartment or a way to plug them in, but they didn't seem to have any way to change batteries or charge them. Then Joe remembered that the Logitech keyboards are solar powered and wonders if something changed in the environment. Client said they recently replaced all the lights with energy efficient LEDs! Apparently the new LED lights are so efficient, they don't have any spare light to charge the keyboards (or more likely, they aren't the right wavelength of light to work with the solar panels).

-Sam talks about voice recognition when meeting someone in person

-After upgrading a hard drive on a 27" iMac, Sam realizes he needed to fix the hinge. He found an excellent option from The Mac Hack. As it turns out, a site that Joe knows well.

-Joe investigates a situation where sent mail doesn't show in the client's Sent mailbox. Mail.app was configured to BCC the client on all emails, and Gmail was deleting the copy from his Sent when the copy in the Inbox was deleted.

-Sam recounts being at JFK Airport in New York City when the emergency alert system was used to warn of a water main break in the next terminal and wonders if iBeacon was used to alert only people in the airport.

-We discuss the recent false alarm in Hawaii which also used the emergency alert system, and while Joe can't help but introduce a conspiratorial angle, it was likely due to bad design. Perhaps Heinlein's Razor (or Hanlon's Razor) – "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" – applies here.

-followup on Episode 236: MacBook Pro - Turn Back Time re: Temp user can not be deleted. Joe noticed that when migrating to a clean install of 10.13.2, Migration Assistant prompts to re-enter some users' passwords. For non-admin users, it changes passwords to a temporary password (looks like one generated by Keychain Assistant) and then prompts the user to change it upon first login. Could this be related to the root login issue? And/or to Joe’s Temp user issue? Note the difference in behavior when using Reset Password vs. Change Password. Joe bets that it's related to the method of storing the password hash – maybe there’s a less secure format for legacy accounts with longstanding passwords, which Apple has now deprecated?

Topics:

We're sponsored this week by Watchman Monitoring, a favorite tool of ours that should be in every professional consultant's toolkit.

Visit WatchmanMonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr and sign up for your free trial to find out how Watchman Monitoring can keep an eye on your client machines and notify you of over 100 issues. Be sure to tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to support the show!

-Jerry humbly shares a story of formatting the wrong drive while preparing new external installers and things to watch out for in APFS volumes when booted from HFS+

-Joe almost attempted a migration to Sierra from High Sierra when setting up Judy's new computer

-Jerry compares HFS+ to APFS issues to the Dr. Seuss Sneetches

-Sam shares his latest experience with Daylite and how he has seen the power of the product. Our own Jerry Zigmont can help!http://www.daylitemac.com

-This leads into a further conversation about Daylite as a product and methods of integration

-Joe has frustrations about Microsoft's auto update. It provides a perfect opportunity to discuss our friends at Addigy

-Jerry talks about some of his non-public facing websites to try and make things easier for his clients. But as it turns out, it ends up creating frustration.

-The group compares MSP models and how they all operate slightly differently

-Sam is starting to evaluate Daylite as a CRM and sees many possibilities for use within his organization. Still, the discussion of a good old fashioned spreadsheet comes about.https://daylitemac.com

-Weldon discusses the future of his training and MSP business as well as his role within the organization

-2018 goals for Weldon: creating and utilizing custom DEP deployment solutions since the future of imaging is changing. Ultimately he wants a great experience for the customer. Here are some of the tools that he is looking into:

-To start the new year, we are very pleased to be joined on our first live show of 2018 by Weldon Dodd of Rewind Technology in Denver, CO. Weldon hangs with the crew as another host in case Sam goes missing again.https://rewindtech.com

-Some things never change, the old HCS land grab jokes are in full swing

-Joe discusses the first zero day exploit of 2018, actually launched via tweet on New Year's Eve. Check out the IOHIDeous narrative on GitHub, kind of interesting! The vulnerability exists in a process called IOHIDUserClient which the macOS limits to having only a single instance at any given time, which happens to be spawned by WindowServer. So in order to exploit the vulnerability, we need to kill the WindowServer process. But terminating it requires admin privileges and essentially reboots the GUI, so this is not a viable mode of exploitation. But it turns out that by logging out the user, WindowServer releases its IOHIDUserClient temporarily, giving the exploit enough time to spawn its own instance of IOHIDUserClient and leverage it to compromise the system. The exploit can use "launchctl reboot logout" which does not display a warning dialog. The exploit can also use an AppleScript command to send loginwindow an event called "AppleEventReallyLogOut" (osascript -e 'tell application "loginwindow" to «event aevtrlgo»'), and loginwindow apparently doesn't care who sent the event, but it does display a dialog box as if the user selected "Log Out" from the Apple menu.

-Jerry wonders if this will be on the CCP test

-Sam recalls a story working after hours at a client when the alarm goes off

-Weldon shares his story of a Promise RAID gone wrong. Friends don't let clients pull drives out of RAID drive bays. It also leads to a further discussion about how to handle RAID solutions and future expansion.

TOPICS:

- Time Machine and its network-equipped brother, Time Capsule, are superb innovations. They make backup seamless, invisible and easy. They’re also slow. Really slow. I’ve had to wait before I put my MacBook Pro to sleep sometimes while a backup finishes and, of course, the initial backup can literally take days.

Here’s how to fix that.

Open a Terminal window, which you’ll find in the Utilities folder within the Applications list, and paste in the following, typing your login password when prompted:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0This command prevents Time Machine’s backup process assuming a low CPU priority, allowing backups to complete insanely quickly. In fact, you’ll see MB and GBs tick past on the Time Capsule progress display in a second-by-second fashion (provided your Mac isn’t very busy with some other task).http://www.mackungfu.org/massively-speed-up-time-capsule-time-machine-backups

- Karaoke Style With Taylor Boyko

- Running With Adam Engst

Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS, one of the oldest and most-respected Internet-based newsletters, distributed weekly to tens of thousands of readers. He has written numerous technical books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles - thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and Macworld. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992, the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993 (with Northwest Nexus for Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh), and the highly successful Take Control electronic book series. In addition, he has collaborated on several Internet educational videos and has appeared on a variety of internationally broadcast television and radio programs. His indefatigable support of the Macintosh community and commitment to helping individuals has resulted in numerous awards and recognition at the highest levels. In the annual MDJ Power 25 survey of industry insiders, he ranked as the second (2000), third (2001, 2002), fourth (2003), fifth (2004), and third (2005/2006) most influential person in the Macintosh industry. He has also been included on the MacTech 25 list of influential people in the Macintosh technical community for both 2006 and 2007, and he was named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And how many industry figures can boast of being turned into an action figure?

Will O'Neal, founder and president of both Mid-Atlantic and Metro-Atlanta Computer Solutions, has been supporting Macintosh for nearly twenty years. He began his career in 1989 operating Linotronic Typesetters for Darby Graphics and worked his way into technical support after becoming an expert with early versions of page layouts, image editing applications and font management issues. He started MACS in 2002. Since then, the company has grown from just Will to twelve Apple enthusiasts, including six Apple Certified outside technicians. Will holds the title of Apple Certified Technical Coordinator, and he regularly attends classes around the world to stay on top of the latest hardware, software and solutions for business of all types and sizes. Because of Will’s vast experience and desire to stay current on ‘all things Apple’, he is also the Lead Technical Advisor for MACS. He has a passion for providing exceptional service and solutions to his customers.

Command-Control-Power

Cmd-Ctrl-pwr is a weekly podcast hosted by three certified members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN), drawing from nearly half a century of combined experience operating technology consulting practices.

Command-Control-Power is a weekly podcast hosted by three certified members of the Apple Consultants Network (ACN), drawing from nearly half a century of combined experience operating technology consulting practices.